The Best Possible Experience: Stories - Nishanth Injam - ★★★.½

AUTHOR: Nishanth Injam

GENRE: Single-Author Anthology.

RATING: 3.5 stars.

In a Nutshell: An anthology focussing on India, Indians, and Indianness here and abroad. Beautiful prose and great characterisation, but somewhat abrupt endings due to the slice-of-life approach. Your reaction to the endings will decide if your experience is the best possible one.

This collection of eleven stories is quintessentially Indian, though its settings are spread across India and the USA. Even the stories that are based within India cover a variety of regions. As such, each tale comes with its own unique appeal.

The stories herein are written in the slice-of-life style, which is going to be the make-or-break factor for your experience of this collection. I am not too fond of this style, though if it is written well, I can *like* the story while not loving it. So my experience was unfortunately not “the best possible experience”, but that shouldn’t take away from the book as it was my shortcoming that made my experience relatively lacklustre.

After a long time have I seen such lush prose in an anthology. The writing creates a vivid picture of the scene and captures the pulse of the characters, portraying even difficult feelings such as melancholy and hiraeth without going over the top. The stories have a genuineness to them, and capture the Indian spirit excellently. There’s a sense of pathos underlying each tale, even in the happy moments, though these are quite minimal. At the same time, the book doesn’t become too maudlin. While most of the stories were dramatic in style, the first one was from the speculative fiction genre. Ironically, this is the one I loved best.

To be honest, I don’t prefer reading works by Indian-origin authors who now reside in the USA, because most of them peddle Indian stereotypes to unsuspecting Western readers. Not this book though. The portrayal of India is as authentic as possible, capturing the positives and the negatives of the country in a realistic way. This is the highest compliment I can pay to any book by an Indian diaspora writer.

There are a few Indian words in the stories but no glossary. This wasn’t a problem for me as all the words were familiar to me. But as this book is being readied for a release in the USA, a glossary might help.

There is no foreword by the author explaining his intent behind and theme for this collection, which disappointed me. (I love reading forewords in anthologies to get an idea of the author’s aim for the collection.)

The author’s writing reminded me of Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies, which is also a similarly-themed anthology having a dual focus on the Indian diaspora in the USA and on contemporary residents of urban and rural India. However, unlike Jhumpa Lahiri’s more traditional plot structure, the endings in Nishanth Injam’s collection were somewhat abrupt due to the slice-of-life approach. Hence, many stories here would have rated higher for me had they offered closure. But most endings left wanting more.

As always, I rated the stories individually. But this time, I can’t really capture my feelings through the ratings because I don’t know how to rate a 4.5 star story with a 2 or 3 star ending. As such, instead of opting for the average of my ratings as usual, I am going with my general sense of satisfaction from the book, which is “I liked it quite a lot”. FWIW, I enjoyed ‘The Bus’, The Immigrant’, ‘Summers of Waiting’, ‘Lunch at Paddy’s’, ‘The Protocol’, and the title story – all of which would have been 4.5 star works had they provided me more satisfying endings.

If you enjoy this writing style and anthologies in general, this is a fabulous collection to try.

My thanks to Pantheon and NetGalley for the DRC of “The Best Possible Experience”. This review is voluntary and contains my honest opinion about the book.